The sculptures were hard to miss at the 2016 Art Show in the Park Avenue Armory — an arresting line of ceramic female busts with rosette heads and raffia torsos, both majestic and ethereal, figural yet abstract.

That may have been the moment when Simone Leigh, the Chicago-born artist behind those sculptures, moved into the mainstream, since the busts quickly sold out — including to the prominent collector Glenn Fuhrman, making other buyers take notice.

Ms. Leigh’s career has taken off since then. She moved from a modest gallery (Tilton) to a larger one (Luhring Augustine) and saw her work acquired by important museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Since October, when she won the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Wein Artist Prize, she’s been checking off firsts. November: The first time one of her pieces sold at a major auction, at Sotheby’s. December: She was shortlisted for the Guggenheim’s 2018 Hugo Boss prize. On Sept. 8, she opens her first significant solo New York gallery show, at Luhring Augustine. And she has been selected as the inaugural winner of the High Line’s new series of large-scale commissions, which will be unveiled in April.

Image

The towering sculpture, which will be cast in bronze, depicts an African-American woman with braids whose torso evokes a skirt-like house.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

“She’s driving a cultural shift at large where black women are being acknowledged as aesthetic leaders,” said Rashida Bumbray, a curator who has worked closely with Ms. Leigh. “It feels like a moment, but it is really just that the wool has been lifted from everyone’s eyes.”

At 50, the artist is hardly an emerging talent — her work has been presented by the New Museum, Creative Time and the Kitchen. The daughter of Jamaican missionaries, Ms. Leigh has steadfastly explored the experiences and social histories of black women through the ceramic tradition for more than 25 years. But the medium — and the artist — were long overlooked by the art world.

“I was told by everyone I knew in ceramics there was no way I would ever be included in the contemporary art space,” said Ms. Leigh, perched on a small couch at her studio in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the only place to sit without getting coated in clay.

Her work didn’t quite fit into any single category, given its multilayered references to African traditions, feminism, ethnographic research, post-colonial theory and racial politics.

Image

A rendering of how “Brick House” will be displayed on the High Line.CreditSimone Leigh/James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, via The City of New York

“Because I was largely ignored, I had a long time to mature without any kind of glare, which worked out for me quite well,” said Ms. Leigh, a regal presence with dangling silver earrings framing her round face. With her newfound success, she said, “I’m more concerned with having the space and the time to be creative.”

Testifying to the current demands on the artist, including a gallery debut, were the many sculptures crowding every surface of her studio on this hot July day (no air conditioning). The project for the High Line — to be displayed on a plinth anchoring the newest section of the elevated park known as the spur — had been dominating her attention: At 16 feet tall, the sculpture is by far the largest she’s ever created, as big as the plinth would allow.

“It’s an icon, it’s a goddess — this very powerful feminine presence in a very masculine environment, because all around you, you have these towering skyscrapers and cranes,” said Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art. “It’s very rare that in the public sphere you see a black person commemorated as a hero or simply elevated on a pedestal.” (In New York, Ms. Leigh’s goddess will be in good company with statues of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Duke Ellington, among others.)

Image

New sculptures by Ms. Leigh that conflate women’s heads with pitchers and vases.CreditSimone Leigh/Luhring Augustine, New York: Photo by Farzad Owrang

Ms. Leigh said she thought “it would be a great opportunity to have something about black beauty right in the middle of that environment.”

She named the piece in part after the Commodores song of the same title, which she listened to on the radio as a child. “It was a celebration of black womanhood that we hadn’t really heard,” Ms. Leigh said. “That was what was resonant about it — not necessarily a male gaze but that beauty was associated with mightiness and strength, as opposed to fragility. Being solid.”

Ms. Leigh said she was fortunate to be able to work on a full-scale clay model at a Philadelphia foundry, rather than the more typical approach of having her small model 3D-scanned, blown up to size and cast in bronze.

“It allows you to make adjustments,” she said.

The most significant change she made was angling down the figure’s skyward gaze. “Her whole attitude, whether she was looking extremely proud or extremely humble,” said Ms. Leigh, “was going to be expressed in the tilt of the chin.”

Image

“I was told by everyone I knew in ceramics there was no way I would ever be included in the contemporary art space,” said Ms. Leigh.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

Another change was the hair, which morphed from rosettes to cornrows. The hairstyle was inspired by the character Thelma from the 1970s TV show “Good Times,” which Ms. Leigh described as “an extremely problematic show,” adding, “but it’s one of the earliest representations of black women I knew.”

“I really like the way they read as cornrows but also to me look like flying buttresses — an older architectural detail,” she added of the braids. “They’ve probably become the most important part of the sculpture right now.”

As in most of Ms. Leigh’s sculptures, the head’s eyes are erased. “When I first started making this, I was trying to abstract the face entirely,” she said. “Gradually, I wanted some African features, to be a little bit more specific.”

The torso echoes the bullet-shaped domed houses of mud and grass that were the traditional dwellings of the Mousgoum communities in Cameroon, and were reproduced at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris.

Image

A view of Ms. Leigh’s exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2016.CreditBrian Forrest/Hammer Museum

The notion of the hut as a primitive dwelling “has been used to humiliate us for years and years,” she said, “when they are actually really quite beautiful and sophisticated objects.” Ms. Leigh added, “I’ve often used that kind of charged image in my work, objects like watermelons or cowrie shells.”

The new sculptures for that show conflate women’s heads with pitchers and vases, inspired by historical objects like African-American face jugs that “fuse the black body with a tool,” said Ms. Leigh. In her hands, however, the shape of a water pot may serve as a crown.

To produce them, Ms. Leigh went to Maine for its wood salt kilns. The sculptures are fired as many as five times, a process that requires at least nine people to monitor the process on four-hour shifts. “There’s an unpredictability to the result,” Ms. Leigh said.

Image

A scene from the 2011 short video “Breakdown,” directed by Ms. Leigh and the artist Liz Magic Laser.CreditSimone Leigh/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Lauren Wittels, the senior director of Luhring Augustine, noted “the physical presence” of Ms. Leigh’s sculptures. “It’s almost like looking at another human,” she said, “they have so much pathos about them.”

The exhibition will also feature a 25-minute video installation produced this year and commissioned by the Berlin Biennial, which Ms. Leigh likened to an episode of the television show “M.A.S.H.,” with “inside jokes to black women,” she said. “I feel like we need a comedy now because we’re in such desperate times.”

Many of the video’s black female performers appeared in “Free People’s Medical Clinic” with Creative Time in 2014, in which Ms. Leigh turned a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone into a walk-in health center, modeled on those opened by the Black Panthers in the 1960s.

Ms. Leigh followed the clinic project with “Waiting Room” at the New Museum in 2016, which looked at various healing environments and explored the social inequalities in health care.

Image

A maquette of “Brick House.”CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

“In each of her forays into wellness,” the curator Helen Molesworth wrote in Artforum in March, “Leigh subtly demands that the field of medicine, as currently constructed by the white, colonialist West, broaden to address the specific concerns and health issues of black women.”

The artist said she’s moved on from that kind of overtly activist art, but she remains deeply interested in female African-American traditions and in women “who, for whatever reasons, have been left out of the archive or left out of history,” she said. “I still think there is a lot to mine in terms of figuring out the survival tools these women have used to be so successful, despite being so compromised.”

She has long asserted that black women are her primary audience, a position some consider controversial.

Ms. Molesworth, in her essay, said she has come around to Ms. Leigh’s point of view, having once been put off by it. “Given the lack of any such systematic inclusion of black women in the fields of Western culture,” she wrote, “this recalibration seems both deeply necessary and positively exhilarating.”

Despite Ms. Leigh’s formal engagement with sculpture, she never went to art school but instead earned her bachelor’s degree in art and philosophy at Earlham College in Indiana.

When she first moved to New York, she worked in an architectural ceramics firm, reproducing tiles for the subway. She lived in Williamsburg, married her roommate, got a Volvo and a brownstone and “was really unhappy.”

They divorced and shared custody of their daughter, Zenobia, now 22 and interested in photography.

Ms. Leigh said she felt as if her career really started in 2010 with a residency at the Studio Museum. Thelma Golden, its director, said she was struck by Ms. Leigh’s “commitment to her medium, the way she was invested in clay — its history, its connection to African Art and African-American art.”

The artist’s work now sells for $40,000 to $125,000.

In 2016, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., included her sculptures in a group exhibition. “They have a fabulous presence,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director, “something both so contemporary and ancestral.”

Also that year, Ms. Leigh had a solo exhibition at the Hammer. “Her approach to social practice — which insists that institutions expand their purview to create more space for a diversity of representations of black women,” said Ann Philbin, the museum’s director, “have encouraged museums to be more attentive to the needs of these audiences.”

Among her many loyal collectors is Mr. Fuhrman, who keeps the bust he bought at the Art Show, the annual fair of the Art Dealers Association of America, prominently displayed in his living room. The sculpture sits alongside works by Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Saville. “It gets comments as much as any work that we have,” Mr. Fuhrman said. “It’s just a beautiful thing.”

Correction:Aug. 31, 2018

An earlier version of this article erroneously attributed a distinction to the artist Simone Leigh’s sculpture, “Brick House,” for the High Line in Manhattan. It is not her first public project; she previously displayed sculptures in Marcus Garvey Park in Manhattan from 2016 to 2017.

Follow Robin Pogrebin on Twitter: @rpogrebin.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section AR, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: She Thinks Big. Really Big.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe